Hitler Made Me a Jew
Boson Books (www.cmonline.com/boson/)
From Hitler to Trujillo
Boson Books (www.cmonline.com/boson/)
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REVIEWS BY BRETT PERUZZI
Nadia Gould and Alfredo Vorshirm both escaped Hitler's Holocaust, but in vastly different ways. Their personalized, compelling memories, published in a series of Holocaust memoirs from Boson Books, are delivered in a way that won't be found in most history books. Unlike most Holocaust survivors who have published accounts of how they survived the horror and inhumanity of the concentration camps, these two narratives recount the authors' success at escaping the Nazis in Europe before they could be sent to the extermination camps. Hitler Made Me a Jew poignantly offers a young woman's coming of age story with the threat of the Third Reich's Final Solution looming in the background. Gould, the daughter of Russian Jews living in France, didn't even know she was Jewish until she was 13 and the Nazis were invading France. Her parents were not religious people, but they knew the Nazis would target them regardless of whether they practiced Judaism. The year was 1940; that year, Gould says, Hitler made her a Jew. What follows is her family's harrowing and circuitous escape from Europe -- through France, across the Pyrenees into Spain, then across a river in a canoe to Portugal. Here the teenager, a French citizen by birth who had never before left her native country, parted with her parents. The detailed descriptions of the settings and characters she encountered throughout her journey give an artistic vibrancy to Gould's story. With the help of American Quakers, she and other Jewish children were sent to the United States to wait out the war. Miraculously, Gould's parents survived in Europe and were reunited with their daughter in America after the war ended. As a young woman, Gould completed her journey by returning to live in her beloved France, where she married and had her first child. She later returned to live in the United States, where she has been a painter for 50 years. Her artwork illustrates the book and provides the cover art. Vorshirm's book, From Hitler to Trujillo, unblinkingly follows the author on his physical and spiritual journey from victim to victor as he remakes his life during and after the war, and ultimately finds the homeland he has been searching for. Vorshirm begins his chronicle with his odyssey from his native Belgium to various parts of Europe during the war. He was imprisoned several times by the Nazis, wounded while fighting on the side of the Italian partisans in Northern Italy and also served in the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division, ending up in Berlin as the Third Reich was defeated. The chapters describing his battlefield experiences are among the most gripping in the book, inspiring admiration for a man who was not content to just flee the war, but actively participated in it for the Allied cause. Vorshirm made it to the United States after the war, although illegally, and then sought refuge in the Dominican Republic, which was ruled by the dictator Trujillo of the book's title. Over the years, Vorshirm rose to a position of prominence in the Trujillo regime. The irony of fleeing one dictator to eventually enter the service of another is not lost on the author. The Caribbean dictator met his fate, however, when he was assassinated in 1961, and Vorshirm returned to private life. In one of the book's final and most poignant scenes, Vorshirm travels to Jerusalem, where he reflects on his life and prays at the Wailing Wall -- a fitting ending for the courageous fighter who traveled from Hitler to Trujillo and finally found his homeland. Brett Peruzzi is a writer in Massachusetts.
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